Grow Your Business With Content

People want to do business with people they know, like and trust. But how do you get people to know, like and trust you if online content marketing is part of your business plan for growing your business?

Getting Known

This is the relatively easy part. You can get your name out there by:

• leaving meaningful comments on other people’s blogs or Facebook Pages
• making connections on Twitter, nurturing them, growing them

or throwing a whole stack of cash at Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, etc

Do you inspire your customers?

Getting Liked

Once people start to know about you, you need them to like what your company is doing and the services or products you produce. But getting people to like you is not necessarily easy.

Cheesy “hey, we’re a serious business” photographs that every two-penny business uses won’t make you more appealing, or encourage people to like you. Neither will telling people you’re “a leading service provider”, a cool website, zillions of press releases, blah, blah, blah.

No, the best way to get people to like you (and your organisation) through content marketing is to show people who you are with:

• online video
• audio

and compelling texts, say, in the form of a kick ass business blog.

Don’t hide behind a wall of crafted PR spin; show your customers who you are, what you do and what you stand for.

Of course, not everyone will love you or what you do. That doesn’t matter. What you need to keep you in business is a sufficient number of customers to keep things turning over and growing. You don’t need every single customer in the world.

Building Trust

Finally, once people have picked up on you, started to like who you are and what you do, you really need to work on growing trust.

It’s trust that builds confidence in you and your products. It’s trust that encourages people to turn to you when it comes to purchasing those B2B services or products that make you unique.

You can build trust by personally always doing what you say you’ll do, as well as ensuring that your products and services are equally reliable.

Trust comes with honesty, friendship, and a sense of being there. With online content marketing your organisation can build trust by giving away valuable information, by ensuring that your content helps customers, inspires their belief in you. So much so that you become the go-to-source on the web.

Just as a variety of multi-media content shows prospects who you are, you can also use this content to show what you do, and moreover share.

So go ahead: use your online content marketing to give your audience what they’re looking for. I’m not talking about giving your actual services of products away for free. If you sell accounting software, make sure your free training videos are the very best online. If you sell filing cabinets, make sure your website shows people how to get the best out of them, say, with an awesome Ebook on different filing techniques.

The Bottom Line

Get people to know, like and trust you with your meaningful content marketing. Ensure that it comes in a variety of flavours such as text, video and audio, provides outstanding value. And don’t forget to make it available online everywhere your potential customers might find it!